Do recent findings indicate that recipients are tuning out email marketers, or is something else going on?

Something strange appears to be happening to email open rates.

Data collected by MarketingSherpa for its "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006," reveals more marketers this year than last are reporting open rates of less than 20 percent, and fewer are seeing open rates of more than 50 percent.

Yet despite this drop affecting 38 percent of emailers surveyed, click-through rates have remained stable. As a percentage of total emails sent, most marketers continue to achieve click-through rates in the range of 3 - 20 percent.

Moreover, conversion rates across the board also are up slightly this year over last, according to information shared by MarketingSherpa during a Dec. 13 teleseminar co-hosted by Silverpop.

So what is going on?
If email response has remained strong, then how can open rates be falling for so many email marketers?

"The general response level to email has remained fairly consistent over several years," said Silverpop CEO, Bill Nussey. "The fact is, people are opening their messages; we're just not measuring them very well."

Open rates are collected when a tiny piece of HTML code called a Web beacon or Web bug activates when an email is opened. But if the email program blocks or disables a message's graphics, then the beacon can't activate, and the open goes unrecorded.

This effect is widespread. Silverpop's "2005 Broken Link Study" found that 40 percent of commercial email arrives in the inbox with the graphics and links partially or completely disabled.

What you can do
If your open rates are falling, and you suspect the culprit may be image suppression, ask recipients to add you to their email address books. This will ensure your messages are delivered directly to the email inbox, with the images intact.

This "white listing" won't help with recipients whose email programs can't read HTML messages, or who have elected to receive plain-text messages, or who download their email to read offline later. But these recipients probably represent a fairly small portion of your email list.

Despite these difficulties in measurement, open rates are still a good barometer of success. Studies show that email users no longer start by reading the subject line, but instead look first at who sent the message. If your open rates are strong, it's a sign that recipients trust your brand. If your open rates have begun to steadily decline over time, it could indicate your messages have gone stale and are no longer resonating with recipients. But if your click-through and conversion rates are holding steady or better yet, improving, then falling open rates may simply be a matter of measurement, not success.